A Shout-Out to Garry Trudeau
Kurt Andersen has a lovely review of Garry Trudeau's new Doonesbury book, "The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time," in today's Times.
The book is something of a twist for Trudeau; it's a collection of his strips about B.D., the football player-turned-soldier who lost his leg in Iraq. I read a number of the strips when they were published in newspapers, and remember thinking how odd it was that one of the few places in the American media dealing so honestly and poignantly about the wounds of war was...a comic strip.
However much later it is now—a year?—I still feel that way. There is so much important reporting, so much urgent storytelling, to be done about this war, and, with the exception of all-too-brief segments on the national news, our major networks do none of it.
When I was a kid, my mother, who is slightly to the left of George McGovern, hung a poster in our kitchen that said, "What if they had a war and nobody came?" I didn't really understand what the Vietnam-era slogan meant till later, but now I think the slogan should be updated: "What if they had a war and nobody cared?" Or: "What if they had a war and everyone watched reality TV?" Because the visual media seems to have decided that the war doesn't exist if they don't show it.
A second thought about Andersen's review. He concludes by writing that "Garry Trudeau, who by all rights should be phoning it in by now, still takes his responsibilities to the strip and his audience seriously, and in service to them still takes large and interesting risks."
I couldn't agree more. I think that one key to leading a meaningful life is to cherish the presence of genius in the moment, not simply to value it after its passage. That's why I watched Michael Jordan play as much as I could, even though I'm not a particularly big basketball fan, and why I was heartbroken when John Belushi died, and why I prayed that Jerry Garcia would finally quit using heroin (how well he played during those years when he was free of it!).
Garry Trudeau has been writing Doonesbury for, what, 35 years now? Remarkable. We should never take this man for granted.
